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Comment Re:claims (Score 2) 48

Efficiency is based on differences in energy that are economically accessible, not on some rambling theories in a newline-free paragraph.

You can access room temperature. You can' economically access the blackness of outer space from the earth's surface. Likewise, you can access the negative terminal on your battery, but not some static charge in the upper atmosphere.

You pump X amount of energy into a heat engine, it expels that energy to an accessible exhaust, and typically 70 to 95 percent of that energy is *not* converted to work. You pump X amount of energy into a battery, it dumps that energy through a motor to its negative terminal, and only 5 to 10 percent of that energy is not converted to work. That's the only way to practically analyze the situation.

We could also all have infinite free energy if we could access the levels below the zero point energy in the quantum fields. One little problem: that's not accessible either.

Comment Re:Buy Chinese EVs? (Score 1) 105

Interestingly though, while 20% of European sales of new cars are already BEVs, it's not the Chinese cars dominating. Chinese brands only have about 3% of the market, while BEVs made in China by non-Chinese brands like Tesla account for 8% of all car sales. The BEV market in Europe is dominated by Stellantis and Volkswagen. with some heavy dose of Korean brands.

Comment Re:claims (Score 4, Insightful) 48

For the example in TFS of 200F water and assuming room temperature exhaust, Mr. Carnot says that the max possible efficiency is less than 20%. Any real world engine, including this one, probably ends up at a low-to-mid single digit percent efficiency. IOW, the vast majority of the heat would still be wasted.

The operator of the facility generating the waste heat might get more energy savings at lower cost by tweaking their processes to be a few percent more efficient in the first place, instead of trying to recover this low-grade energy source with an elaborate engine and plumbing.

Comment Re:Linus is right, but this is really not news (Score 1) 80

Before NT, Windows was an absolute mess. I think the only reason most people put up with it was that they didn't know anything better was possible and since Windows was so widespread it was a misery everyone shared.

I think that many of those people were also recent DOS users. Given that DOS systems would often simply freeze up several times per day and require a reboot (easy to do since any bug in the user's application could do this), once they added a protected mode pseudo-kernel to Windows (maybe starting with Windows/386 2.1), it was actually a slight improvement over what they were used to since DOS crashes could sometimes be isolated to one virtual terminal.

Comment Re:I'm not saying we're aliens (Score 3, Interesting) 42

My take is completely different. If the building blocks of Life are so abundant, obviously, they are forming spontaneously without biological predecessor. We are built from ribose, nucleobases and phosphates, because they are everywhere. (And this throws a big wrench into the idea of Silicon based life, because we don't see the silicon equivalents of our base molecules appearing in comets and asteroids.)

Comment Re:The old auto makers are fucked. (Score 1) 254

The cars I mentioned use 0W40. A car with shorter oil change intervals than 10K is probably not marketable where I live. Given that the average total time on the road is about 18 years, and the average yearly mileage about 10K, this would mean that the average car is driven for 180K miles with those long intervals.

Comment Re:The old auto makers are fucked. (Score 1) 254

Ask your company fleet manager why they get rid of them at 90K miles if they’re working fine.

Because it was a leasing car, and after 5 years, the leasing contract ran out and could not be extended. Colleagues of mine with more road trips put more than 125K miles on their cars before their contracts run out. And the local mechanic who was doing the oil change (five times during my run) was not laughing at all, because it was his everyday work. In fact, I went to the mechanic whenever the car engine light came up and demanded the oil change. Only one time, when I came in after 17K miles, he was a little wary because I was postponing the oil change for too long for his taste.

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